Fiduciary

How to spell fiduciary

9 letters · 5 syllables

7 of the 35 people asked to spell fiduciary in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is feduciary. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

feduciary fiduciary

What people typed instead

• feduciary4 people

How to pronounce fiduciary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fiduciary mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the legal duty to act in another party's best financial interest, in a position of trust.
2. nounA person or organisation that holds money or property in trust for someone else and must act in that person's interest.

Fiduciary in a sentence

• adjective

  The financial adviser has a fiduciary duty to put clients first.

• noun

  As the estate's fiduciary she had to account for every transaction.

• adjective

  Board members owe a fiduciary responsibility to the company's shareholders.

• noun

  The bank acted as fiduciary for the children's inheritance.

Where does fiduciary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin fiduciarius, meaning 'held in trust' or 'of something entrusted'. It was built on fiducia, which meant 'trust' or 'confidence', and that noun in turn grew from the verb fidere, 'to trust', and the closely related noun fides, 'faith' or 'good faith'. English adopted it in the early 1600s, first in legal and religious senses, before it settled into its modern use describing someone who manages money or property on another person's behalf. The same fides root still sits inside familiar relatives such as 'fidelity', 'confide', and 'bona fide', all of which carry that idea of faith and trust. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the soft -ci- pronounced like 'sh' tempts writers toward a wrong consonant, even though the c traces straight back to the Latin original.

How the word is built

• fiduci- (from Latin fiducia: trust, confidence)
• -ary (adjective/noun suffix)